If you run a small business and you are choosing an AI assistant, "which one is best?" is the wrong first question. A better one: which tools are people actually using, and which way is that moving?
I track public data on this. It is not a count of users, and it is not a quality ranking. It is the share of website visits that arrive from each AI chatbot, measured by StatCounter on sites that use it. That shows which assistants send people out to the web.
September 2026: share of AI-chatbot referrals
- ChatGPT: 80.5%
- Gemini: 10.9% (up 3.0 points over three months)
- Perplexity: 5.8% (down 2.0 points)
- Microsoft Copilot: 1.8% (down 1.7 points)
- Claude: 1.0% (down 2.8 points)
Three things stand out
- ChatGPT is far ahead, but Gemini is the only major tool gaining share in this data.
- Perplexity, Copilot and Claude lost share over the same three months, so do not read "popular" as "best". Claude, for example, is strong for long documents and coding, but it sends fewer visits to websites.
- This measures traffic to websites, so tools used mainly inside an app or an editor (for example coding assistants) are under-counted.
How to use this when choosing
Pick by the job (writing, research, coding, images), check the price in pounds on the official page, then look at the trend as a tie-breaker, not a verdict.
I publish the live version, with pricing, prompt tips and a separate view for bots and automation tools, at https://softcheap.co.uk/ai/dashboard/ (bots: https://softcheap.co.uk/bots/dashboard/). The charts can be embedded for free if you want to use them in your own post. Method and sources are listed on the dashboard page. Corrections welcome.
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